Standard of Living
Pennsylvania students will soon be required to know more about
the natural world around them.
By Gwen Shaffer
Since September, about 25 twelfth grade students at Liberty
High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania have been tackling the big
job of restoring a former gristmill and turning it into a nature center.
These students are doing everything from raising a million dollars
for the renovations, to working with the architects on redesign. It
may not sound like it, but this is a class. While working on the Illicks
Mill, the kids earn credits in history and English.
"The Illicks Mill Project is a business," says teacher Karen
Dolan. "A 501(c)3 run right here out of room 227 at Liberty High
School. That's the essence of the curriculum - doing everything we
need to do to restore a beautiful vacant building on a high quality
coldwater stream that flows through our city."
 When
the stone gristmill was built in 1856, local farmers would bring their
wheat and corn here to have it ground into flour. From 1911 to 1942,
the city used the mill as a water-pumping station. During the 1960s,
local teenagers transformed the building into a makeshift rec center.
But its been mostly vacant since 1971. The years of neglect are obvious
by the missing window sashes and rotting wooden floor.
A handful of Dolan's students volunteer to give a tour of Illicks
Mill and the adjacent Monocacy Creek, demonstrating just how much
work is needed. They unlock a bolt and pull off an ancient wooden
beam barricading the front door. But amid the decay, high school senior
Nick Parker sees big plans for a future nature center here. It's tentatively
scheduled to open in 2004, he says, wandering the first floor of the
mill.
"The main entrance is on the south side of the building,"
Parker says. "There will be display areas in here for the environmental
center…Upstairs on the second floor will be classrooms, downstairs
in the basement is going to be a research room and wet lab area. The
attic or what will be mezzanine will be office space."
In January, Pennsylvania became the first state in the country
to implement academic standards for the environment and ecology. Teachers
in grades kindergarten through 12th grade will now be required to
integrate nine environmental topics into their other subjects.
The environment is an integral part of our everyday lives - from the
air we breathe to the water we drink. Yet, many American students
are graduating high school with minimal knowledge of the natural world
around them, says Patricia Vathis, a curriculum advisor at the Pennsylvania
Department of Education. Five years ago, Vathis began formulating
what ultimately became nine academic standards for environment and
ecology.
 "Even
though we've been doing a lot of professional development for teachers,
we still found that they weren't really a part of the curriculum in
the depth that children could leave school being environmentally literate
about living in a community," she says. "That's what our
standards are all about. There is nothing in them that a person living
on the face of the earth shouldn't know."
The standards finally became state law in January and an assessment
test - to be administered to students in grades 4, 7, 10 and 12 -
is in the works. Vathis commissioned researchers at Penn State University
to study how environmental issues are being taught in schools across
the state.
"They found that four of the nine standard areas are being taught
and well. They are the ones I assumed were being taught...ecology,
threatened and endangered species," she says. "The areas
where we are having the most problems environmentally were not being
addressed at all in the schools - agriculture, integrated pest management,
watersheds and wetlands, and environmental laws and regulations."
Schools don't need to create an additional course to meet the requirements,
Vathis adds. But by the start of the 2002-2003 school year, educators
will be required to incorporate these topics into the subjects they
already teach, such as biology and political science. Most environmental
educators advocate this approach, called infusion.
"First, those environment and ecology concepts fit well into
other courses and subject areas," says Dr. Richard Wilke, co-director
of the National Environmental Education Advancement Project at the
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. "Secondly, it is not easy
to fit another separate course into a curriculum that some view to
be overcrowded already. And there are costs involved in terms of staff
and time to do that."
Wilke characterizes Pennsylvania educators as "leaders"
in the field.
 "There
are right now 10 states working on developing curriculum and 10 others
working on developing environmental education curriculum guides. Pennsylvania
is a model in doing it," Wilke says.
And in order to make that model work, environmental organizations
all over the state are beginning to gear their children's programs
towards the curriculum requirements. And so is Earth Force, a national
program created in 1994 as a means for students to combine their dual
interests in community service and environmentalism. In Pennsylvania,
Earth Force chapters are now helping teachers get up to speed on the
new state standards.
About 25 teachers recently gathered for a Saturday morning training
session at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. On this sunny
but brisk winter afternoon, the group trekked down to a creek running
through campus for a hands-on lesson on watersheds.
George Ambrose, a teacher at Penn Wood West Junior High in Darby,
Pennsylvania, leads the group to a bridge. Ambrose already uses his
personal interest in the environment as content for teaching his ninth
grade students how to collect data, write reports and create Power
Point presentations.
Today, Ambrose is helping out with the teacher training by explaining
how to use the features of a stream as teaching content in the classroom.
For instance, he notes, students can learn new words (like macro-invertebrates
and riparian) and how to identify various critters simply by turning
over rocks in a creek. Ambrose also explains how to judge water quality.
"For the next categories - water and soil odor - we need to get
down closer," Ambrose says, reading from a clipboard. He orders
his "pupils" to edge closer to the stream bank.
"Step sideways if you're not used to walking down a bank,"
he cautions, as dead leaves and weeds crunch underfoot. "Step
sideways."
"Rapids, ripples and runs are terms that determine physical appearance
and predictors of health of stream," he says wading into the
water. "…Here, water has a chance to pool. You see a different
physical look on the water than areas where the stream is free-running…"
 Like
most government mandates, the ecology and environment curriculum
requirements come with a price tag. While Earth Force trainings are
free for teachers, the organization invests about $3,000 in materials
and support for every participant. And if teachers opt to take their
students on a river sojourn or to a state park, transportation and
program costs are inevitable. With both urban and rural school districts
financially strapped, that means teachers must spend more time applying
for outside grants.
Still, research shows that the benefits of environmental education
are worth the added cost. The State Education Environmental Roundtable
in San Diego studied more than 60 schools over the past seven years.
"We discovered that when teachers use local environment or local
community as the basis for helping students achieve more in science
math, language arts, social studies, there's a big pay off,"
says roundtable Director Dr. Gerald Leiberman. "Not only do students
achieve more, but we've found that their behavior is better, they
are more engaged in school, and they tend to not drop out. Generally,
there's a completely different sense of the importance of education
for students who realize that what they are learning has a connection
to their local community."
Given Leiberman's findings, it would seem to make sense for environmental
issues to be universally taught in American schools. But Leiberman
suggests that some people perceive teaching about the environment
to be controversial.
"People are concerned because they don't want children told answers
that may not be correct or scientifically sound," he says.
One of those people is Jane Shaw. She is the co-author of Facts
Not Fear, a teaching guide for parents who desire what Shaw calls,
"a more balanced view" of environmental issues. She questions
Pennsylvania's environmental curriculum standards - and others like
them - on the grounds that teaching material is biased.
"It tends to be exaggerated, the textbooks that deal with topics
like renewable energy resources, endangered species, environmental
laws…they tend to emphasize the worst case scenarios and give
the impression that species will be extinct in the next few years,"
Shaw contends.
She is also concerned that environmental education "crowds out"
basic science, and that the curriculum pushes a left-wing agenda.
"I don't think the schools should be political, yet that is the
nature these days of environmental education."
Pennsylvania's new environmental standards are a response to these
general concerns. The Pennsylvania Department of Education says it
took pains to ensure the standards were steeped in science and didn't
"take sides."
"We don't tell students to tie themselves to a tree and we don't
tell them to cut down a tree," says the department's Patricia
Vathis. "We tell them a tree's form and function, how to use
the land, and how to regenerate. We talk about the social, science
and political as it relates to the content."
Certainly, the vast majority of students taking environmental
science classes don't equate their hands-on projects with political
activism. Liberty High School students receive history and English
credits for participating in the Illicks Mill Partnership. But standing
alongside the Monocasy Creek, the students say they're gaining knowledge
beyond those two subjects.
Twelfth grader Nate Picone says he is learning fundraising and accounting
skills.
"We write a lot, whether it's letters to businesses or writing
grants to corporate sponsors," Picone says. "And even math
- we have people who pay bills and write checks."
His classmate, Nick Parker, says biology is a major element of the
Illicks Mill project. "When we start doing stream studies and
hands on activities with water quality, it will be very science oriented."
And Michelle Longenbach says the project far exceeds the typical high
school civics class. "Other twelfth graders have government and
economics right now. But we are actually getting firsthand experience
dealing with them."
And that experience, these students say, will stay with them for life.
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